


thank god you're okay

by weekend_conspiracy_theorist



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/F, Tumblr Prompt, trans!cisco
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 23:05:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5559140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weekend_conspiracy_theorist/pseuds/weekend_conspiracy_theorist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Iris West saves Linda Park, and one time Linda saves Iris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	thank god you're okay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_warm_beige_color](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_warm_beige_color/gifts).



1.

Iris is talking. She’s probably saying important things and being near intolerably clever and witty as she does so, but Linda isn’t listening.

She’s far too distracted.

The sun is high in a pale blue sky, its rays glinting off of the pendant of Iris’s necklace and accentuating the way it rests perfectly in the hollow of her throat; the temperature is at that perfect level of warm-not-hot that means that Iris can shed her work blazer, walk down the street with her shoulders and arms bare; and the color of Iris’s lipstick, drawn to Linda’s attention by the movement of Iris’s lips as she talks, is oh-so-right in a way that makes Linda want to kiss it off.

Take everything together, and Linda Park never stood a goddamn chance at being able to pay attention to her surroundings.

And so:

“Linda!” Iris grabs her arm, drags her back away from the edge of the sidewalk. A car blares its horn as it continues through the intersection—Iris shouts after it, “WE HAVE A WALK SIGNAL, ASSHOLE!”

Linda waves off Iris’s concerned glance, forces a smile through the realization that she almost died for unrequited love. How utterly Shakespearean.

2.

The next time is absolutely not Linda’s fault. She’s standing in line at the bank, minding her own goddamn business, when a man tears open his jacket to reveal a vest of plastic explosives, waves a dead man’s switch in the air, and starts ranting about the bank screwing him over on a loan.

Linda tucks her hand into her pocket, unlocks her phone by muscle memory, and hits speed dial number two. She’s not one hundred percent certain that the man’s voice is loud enough to be heard clearly through her pocket or that Iris will pick up instead of letting it go to voicemail, but thirty seconds later a red figure streaks in and then out of the bank, taking the bomber with it.

She pulls her phone out of her pocket and calls Iris again—her hands are shaking, she realizes; adrenaline pounding through her even if there’s nothing left to fight or flee from. “I haven’t put him back in my phone since we broke up,” she says when Iris picks up, something like justification in her tone.

“Oh, thank god you’re okay,” is Iris’s response.

(They both start laughing, vaguely hysterical, very much loud. The bank teller gives Linda a dirty look.)

3.

“Ugh, no, don’t go to that stupid race.” Iris rolls over onto her side, one hand keeping the sheet firmly in place (this is still new, they’re still self-conscious around each other, even with all of the lovely, lovely sex that’s been going on), and makes the most pitiful puppy dog eyes Linda’s ever seen in her life. “Call in sick, have someone else go.”

“There’s no one else to go,” Linda tells her, but she can feel herself wavering. She’s paused in pulling on her shirt, only her arms through the sleeves, the rest of the shirt stretched across her collarbone. “Marty’s sick right now, and Tracy’s on her honeymoon.”

“No one cares about Nascar anyway,” Iris says with a huff.

Linda laughs, finishes pulling her shirt over her head. “Lots of people care about Nascar. I care about Nascar, actually.”

“No, you don’t.” Iris narrows her eyes, sits up so that her back is leaning against the headboard of the bed. “You hate baseball because it’s too repetitive; there’s no way you like Nascar, where all they do is drive around in circles over and over and over.”

Linda puts a purposeful sway to her hips as she strolls into the bathroom in pursuit of a hairbrush, and she hears Iris suck in breath. (Linda smirks to herself.) “I used to date a Nascar driver,” she calls back. “Repeated exposure induced a little nugget of fondness—like Stockholm Syndrome.”

Iris rises from the bed, tugging the sheet with her in a rustle of cotton, and shuffles into the doorway of the bathroom. She begs, “Stay here with me.”

“You’ve already made me late.” Linda presses past her, dropping a kiss to her lips on her way. “That’s all you get.”

(And it’s all it takes to make Linda miss her bus—one that gets slammed by a truck driver running a red.)

4.

Linda’s fingers are cramping, her arms shaking from the exertion, her eyes watering from fumes and the sweat dripping down her forehead. She’s never regretted any ex-boyfriend so badly as she’s regretting Barry Allen at this moment; she was never dangled over a pit of acid before she dated a superhero.

“Asshole!” she shouts, because there’s not much she can do other than dangle here and heckle. She could try to get her legs up over the bar as well, give her arms a break, but—well, she’s been doing push-ups lately, not sit-ups. Her core training is sadly lacking.

She has her eyes squeezed shut against the acidic vapor wafting through the air—all she can do is feel the burn in her arms and listen to the whooshing sound of Barry running, the smacking of him punching and getting punched, the sizzling and popping of the acid below her.

“Do your parents know this is what you get up to in your free time?” she snarls. “I’m pretty sure that supervillain wasn’t what they wanted their little boy to grow up into.”

“Not helping, Linda!” Barry shouts.

“Fuck off, Flash! This is all your fault!”

There’s a particularly loud smacking sound, and Barry’s next shout is tattered, pained. “Seriously, Linda!”

“Yeah, Linda,” Iris whispers, and there are hands wrapping around Linda’s wrists. “If you stop yelling now, it’ll take him longer to notice you’re gone.”

5.

“Save me,” Linda squeals, interrupting Iris and Caitlin’s conversation to press tightly against Iris’s side. She gets a bemused glance from the both of them, but she’s too busy checking over her shoulder to notice.

“Come oooooon,” Cisco calls, and he’s noticeably drunk, listing to one side, a bright grin on his face. “Mistletoe, Linda!” he waves at the sprig pinned to the ceiling above his head. “It’s tradition!”

“I swore off of boys after I found out Barry was a superhero and my life turned into an action movie!” Linda shoots back, cowering behind Iris as best she can. (She’s only an inch taller; it really shouldn’t be this hard.) “I’ve almost died on like six separate occasions! You all officially have cooties in my book!”

“Hey now.” Cisco points at her, frowning. “You take that back. Everyone knows that it’s the Y chromosome that carries cooties, and I don’t have one of those.”

“Not risking it!”

Cisco pouts, and Linda tugs at Iris’s arm, mouths “Please!”

Iris bites her lip to keep from smiling, but there’s this little uptick at each corner, a crinkle in her eyes. “Come on, he’s got a point about the whole Y chromosome thing,” she says, voice shaking with suppressed laughter.

“I’ll do anything you want tonight,” Linda hisses. “Just tell him you won’t let him kiss your girlfriend!”

Iris’s eyebrow goes up. “Now, how can I resist an offer like that?”

+1

Iris West gets in a lot of trouble.

Linda’s fallen into her fair share of dangerous situations in past months, too, but Iris doesn’t even blink when a story ends in a shootout or she gets sucked into physically helping defeat this week’s supervillain.

Linda feels her stress growing every time Iris comes home breathless, gushing about her adventures—she’s cooked seven meals in four days, is running out of ingredients in her pantry and she can’t stop. She doesn’t know what to say, how to ask Iris to be more careful, to not rely on Barry’s interference just to get her through a day. (Iris is stunningly capable, but one woman is nothing compared to an entire gang or a metahuman capable of fantastic things.)

“Linda, are you awake?” Iris’s fingers press to her cheek, warm and soft and oh-so-familiar. Linda groans, presses up into the touch as best she can with a pounding head, and Iris lets out a sob of relief. “Why the hell did you jump in front of a bullet for me, you idiot?” she demands, but all Linda hears in her voice is fear, not anger.

Maybe, she thinks, this says it all for her.

 


End file.
